About

Welcome to a new CCNA training website

Hi and welcome to CCNA and Beyond.

This website is designed, in conjunction with the CCNA and Beyond book, to help you learn to be a kick-ass network engineer. It's not just about reading and taking the exam, it's about learning what it takes to be a network engineer, and all the fun times and hard times this entails.

This website will be continually updated with labs and little quizzes to get you through your CCNA, so please sign up for the email updates, follow me on Twitter, or just check back regularly.

A little about me as an author

I have written three other books; "BGP for Cisco Networks", "MPLS for Cisco Networks" and "VPNs and NAT for Cisco Networks", which are aimed at CCNP/CCIE students, but are enjoyed by CCNA students as well. These books are also available on Amazon.

I started writing as I studied for my CCIE, which I passed in 2015 (#49337), I had already started writing to track my progress on the website 802101.com, and the first book (BGP for Cisco Networks), was a bit of a gamble, in that writing a book was never something I had done before, I was not sure if there was room in the market, or how it would be received. That said, no one ever achieved anything by doing nothing, so I gave it a shot. I released it on Kindle first, and then a colleague suggest CreateSpace as a way of releasing in print, with no outlay on my part. I am very pleased to say that print does much better than Kindle. I'll never become a millionaire from writing, but they are popular, and the books sell enough each month (about 200 copies split between the three volumes), to make it feel worthwhile.

They are in the top ten networking books on Amazon, so I must be doing something right!

Top networking books


Books should be priced reasonably

The books are not priced too highly, I don't agree with having to spend $120 on a Kindle book, that's just ridiculous. So my books are priced pretty reasonably (in my opinion). Createspace do all the printing etc, so they get a big cut, and the Kindle books are priced lower than print. This one is priced a little bit higher, for a number of reasons. It's a much bigger book, the PDF used to create it is over 120MB, so more pages mean greater printing costs. Also, because of the size it changes the whole Kindle scenario, to qualify for the 70% royalty it would need to cost under $9.99. Because the 70% option charges (me) for the download each time it's purchased, I would actually end up owing Amazon about $18. Which is not a viable option. So I have to go for the 35% royalty option instead, so I have tried to keep the cost as low as I can.

Books should not cost a fortune. Learning should be accessible to all.


Why people like my books

The feedback I get is that people like the difference between my books and other publications, the writing style is certainly different, I would describe it as a little more personal. Also the books all do one thing; build up, bit-by-bit, as real networks do. This seems to be very popular with people, even to the level that I get requests, either via the website, or through LinkedIn, email, Twitter etc to write more in the "for Cisco Networks" series.

A little about me in general

I live with my wife and two kids (twin four-year old boys) in a little village in Bedfordshire in the UK. When I get a few free moments I like to listen to Pearl Jam, Red Kite, The Beastie Boys and Prince. I like collecting concert posters (mainly of the above). Even at the age of 38, I still love building Lego (mainly Star Wars).